AUBURN HILLS, Mich. – Lawrence Frank may still look like the office intern, the winner of some basketball reality show, but he is no innocent. Not after four months on the job. Not now, after standing hopelessly by and watching his Nets get hopelessly butchered by the Pistons in Game 1 of their Eastern Conference semifinal.

Whatever happens tonight will be no referendum on Frank’s capabilities as a coach. Everything he’s done thus far proves he’s going to be a good one, and that the Nets will be lucky to capture this growth stock on the ground floor.

That said . . .

It would be a wonderful thing for Frank’s stature as a coach on the come, and for the Nets’ own confidence as the conference’s toughest out, if the team that arrives at the Palace tonight bears a striking difference to the one that departed three nights ago. It would be nice to see a difference in passion, in performance, in presentation.

It also would be nice to see that Frank learned from the humbling lesson he absorbed on the knee of Larry Brown the other night. If Frank’s brief history has told us anything, it is that he will figure out where he went wrong and will fix that hole. Brown may find others tonight; it’s what Hall of Fame coaches do. But you shouldn’t expect the margin to look as vast and as wide as it did Monday night in the 78-56 Pistons victory.

“We’re still a very confident team. We’re not going to let one game shatter what we’re able to accomplish,” Frank said earlier this week, after one of what have surely been three straight sleepless nights. “But at the same time we have a great deal of respect for Detroit. We’ve watched a lot of games of teams that have been effective against Detroit. It just comes down to: We have to do a couple of things different and some things just better.”

In truth, the coach stands at the front of that line. It is hardly a capital offense to be out-coached by Brown; across the length and breadth of his career, he’s done that everywhere: in near-empty ABA arenas; inside Phog Allen Fieldhouse, on freezing Kansas nights; in Indianapolis, back when the coaching gold standard was supposed to be set by Pat Riley; even, for a couple of years, on some lonely nights in East Rutherford.

Frank was the first to recognize the disparity the other night, taking the blame for the loss, saying, “It falls on my shoulders.” All he was doing was following the Van Gundian script of trying to obscure things like Richard Jefferson’s 1-for-12 shooting night, or the way Detroit’s stable of muscle men neutralized Kenyon Martin. Nobody was about to heap all the blame on Frank’s shoulders, except Frank.

Now comes a special challenge. Because Frank has spent much of the last four months justifying the palace coup that shook up the Nets back in January, bringing preparation and a sideline presence that was admittedly missing during Byron Scott’s regime.

Tonight, Frank will try to fill the biggest set of slippers Scott left behind. Never forget that whatever you want to say about Scott’s values as a coach, he proved to be a master chess-player during most of the past two playoff runs.

Whenever the Nets faced a crisis (short of being physically overmatched in two straight Finals), Scott found a way to perfectly manipulate his team’s personality, whether it was in the huddle before overtime after Reggie Miller nearly stole away that unforgettable Game 5 two years ago; whether it was in Boston after the Nets had blown that 23-point fourth-quarter lead; whether it was the way he defiantly took on Boston fans last year, thereby shielding Jason Kidd from a city’s scorn.

More than the specter of Brown, Frank must deal with the ghost of Scott tonight. That may be the most intriguing match-up of all.